Blogs as aggregators and producers

I was reading The Park Paradigm this morning, noting Sean’s “obligatory” post/comment on Google Finance. In it he refers to an external post from Internet Outsider, which makes the point that Google Finance works better than Yahoo Finance because it concentrates on content aggregation rather than content production.

And this made me think of blogs again, and an old observation of mine:  There are three types of blogs:

  • Thinkers, where there is a lot of original content created
  • Linkers, where there is a lot of original content pointed to
  • Stinkers, where neither of these takes place

I sense there is a “right” thinker-linker ratio which will aid and catalyse co-creation of content through comment and “snowballing”. Too much T and it’s all too theoretical. Too much L and it’s a news service. And there’s never a good reason for any S.

Any thoughts or experiences out there? What makes you read a blog? What makes you go back? What makes you link?

Blogs as institutional memory and aids to teamwork

When I put people on a blogroll it’s because I read them. Just like by the time I implement last.fm it should show the music I’m actually listening to. In fact there’s probably a market for the equivalent of last.fm for blogs….someone out there listening?

Anyway, here are a few ideas  that did their serendipity thing on me today while I was reading other people’s blogs.

The first was at Accidental Light, where Malc was opining on self-healing organisations. Great post. And it made me think about institutional memory.

In days of old when job mobility and attrition were relatively low, teamwork and consensual approaches were easy to achieve in large organisations.

In team sessions individuals made sacrifices. Established their unease or disagreement with some stated thing, and once that was done, went with the team view. This allowed a Lencioni-like trust to operate, giving people the chance to express their concerns.

This capacity to make sacrifices as part of a team is critical to team behaviour. And one of the reasons people made the sacrifices was because they knew the other team members would remember.

As job mobility grew, this became harder to guarantee. People were less willing to make sacrifices, and consensual behaviour went out of the window. Why? Because they could no longer be sure who would remember the sacrifice.

And so we saw teams move as teams, to try and retain the memory. This happened in advertising, in research, in IT, even in aspects of trading. People moved as teams because they had created a trust relationship with a history of sacrifice and teamwork, and they wanted to retain that trust relationship.

Now we have blogs and wikis and IM. A digital environment. Dissent and concern can be established and recorded, and yet a consensual approach can be taken.

As for me, I haven’t quite got the hang of attrition and why it happens. I cannot for the life of me understand why any firm would plan for a level of attrition. I would prefer to prevent, not accept. Fossilfool me.

But maybe blogs can help.

More later on what happened when I read Park Paradigm. Next post.

Don’t cross the river if you can’t swim the tide

Don’t try denying livin’ on the other side……America, Don’t Cross The River

 

Great band. Not just about a Horse with No Name. Incidentally, I’d always wondered why an American band that made original music, writing it, playing it, singing it, would call themselves America. And it was only recently I found out that they were all children of US servicemen stationed in the UK, and it all made sense.

Reading The Man In the Doorway’s recent post, and reading Steven Johnson’s article in Time (see previous post), got me thinking again.

You “organise” within a firm to achieve a small number of things:

  • to prioritise the allocation of resources towards achieving some agreed goals
  • to handle conflicts within matrices
  • to deal with issues escalated up a hierarchy
  • to monitor and review progress against plan
  • to refine the allocation process as a result of feedback
  • to refine the allocation process as a result of new stimuli

When you do this 19th century “organising”, one of the things you rely on is the flow of uncorrupted information. Fundamentally what you are doing is making decisions on a plethora of things because of your position in the hierarchy.

Which is fine when it works. Time for an uncommercial break, “a word from our sponsor”.

Ten of my favourite Drucker short quotes:

  • Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things
  • It’s more important to do the right thing than to do things right
  • Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.
  • So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.
  • We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn
  • In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had to worry about where the next meal would come from
  • There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
  • The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong question
  • No executive has ever suffered because his subordinates were strong and effective.
  • Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation

Leadership and learning. Two things that don’t happen too well in hierarchies.

Ok, we’re back. Where were we? Oh yes, Malc’s post on magical numbers. In my comment I pointed people at George Miller’s famous paper, always worth a read, which you can find here.

And with that at the back of my mind, I was reading Steven Johnson’s blog, and a few more scales dropped from my eyes.

I spoke before of organisational hierarchies being up-down and networks being sideways and Conway’s Law and the implications for social software.

And until today I didn’t really get one thing.

When people complain to me or criticise blogs and wikis and IM, the usual reason they complain is because they don’t like the “non-work” element in such things. And my usual response has been that I’m not prepared to control or tabulate watercooler, restroom or coffeeshop conversations either.

I just didn’t realise they don’t like those things either. The people who object to social software actually object to social anything at work. Except under their control.

Don’t try denyin’ livin’ on the other side.

Now ask yourself this question: In the offices of the future, which skill set will today’s kids draw upon in their day-to-day tasks?

I love Steven Johnson. The headline above is from an article he’s published in Time Magazine, which you can find here. It says everything I wanted to say about learning from our children, only better. I particularly like the following: (all emphases mine)

“Any time a new technology comes along, an implicit cost-benefit analysis gets made. The trouble with the current debate about Generation M is that we have a phalanx of experts lined up to measure the costs but only a vague, intuitive sense of the benefits.”

And

“this dramatic spike in digital participation is, for the most part, sharpening the minds of Generation M, not dumbing them down. But it’s hard to see that improvement without the right yardstick. The skills they’re developing are not trivial. ”

And

“They’re learning to analyze complex systems with many interacting variables, to master new interfaces, to find and validate information in vast databases, to build and maintain extensive social networks crossing both virtual and real-world environments, to adapt existing technology to new uses. And they’re learning all this in their spare time–for fun!”

Read it. Read all of it. Because tomorrow’s staff, customers, competitors and CEOs are all Generation M. Well, maybe just the odd CIO as well.

And if we want to attract them, retain them, develop and release their potential, then we need to design systems that will help them do that.

Right now, we are still looking at how better to design bridles and bits while the metamorphosis of the car is complete.

I guess I could say “legacy costs”. Or “The Innovator’s Dilemma”. Or “Henry Ford’s faster horses”.

Four pillars: The costs of “legacy”

Legacy costs come in many shapes and sizes, and the more I look at them, the more I realise how much of an albatross they can be. They really obscure people’s vision and can corrupt decision-making unless care is taken.

  • It is said that the first $3000 spent on building a US car goes to retiree healthcare, making the industry less competitive.
  • During the run-up to Y2K, I was asked to look at the preparedness of some Polish banks; their systems, post 1990, were too new to have the problem. It’s the banks with older systems that had to spend money checking everything.
  • Many firms (like the one I work in) capitalise software development, creating a sins-of-the-father problem for later years.
  • Having lived in Calcutta and in London, I have seen first-hand some of the problems of being “the first city” to do something, particularly in transportation or utility. You can’t get rid of it as easily later.
  • The spaghetti of regulation covering two areas, telecoms and intellectual property, behave similar to tax regulations. They are complex and people exploit the complexity and there are winners (who would do anything to hold the status quo) and losers (who will do anything to change it).
  • The minds and hearts of the people used to the legacy.

Regulation and bad law. Infrastructural investment requirements. Accounting policies. The difficulties of having to perform complex change operations on “living” things, much like skin-graft meets open heart surgery. Human inertia. So many legacy costs.

It is so much easier to start from scratch.

That’s what I used to think.

Until I saw more and more of what today’s emerging technologies could do.

Step 1, in the mid 90s, was to wire up static pages and queries. Step 2, in the late 90s, was to wire up transaction initiating pages and forms. Step 3 was to connect these things together and form mini business models.

But step 4 is to allow co-creation. Not just co-creation between people, but between applications. SOA allows for co-creation if we understand the power of things like search and syndication. We need to rethink data mining and EAI and all that jazz, we need to understand that the marginal costs of storage are trivial, that we can afford to record everything and tag everything.

Twenty years ago, if I said that the most important component of a trading system would be a Visicalc lookalike, people would have laughed at me. Now even though I want to, I cannot get rid of the stuff.

We need to understand the value of syndication without being bogged down in all our yesterdays. Legacy does not mean albatross. But we have many Ancient Mariners.

More later.